SwaggSec claims China Telecom data breach

Hacktivist group SwaggSec is claiming the scalps of China Telecom and Warner Brothers after apparently taking advantage of poor security to infiltrate their networks and steal a sizeable booty of sensitive data.

SwaggSec said that hacking the Chinese teleco, which it did via a dodgy SQL server, “was as simple as we assumed it would be”, and claimed to have exposed poor security practices in harvesting the log-in data of over 900 admins:

China Telecom's SQL server had an extremely low processing capacity, and with us being impatient, after about a month straight of downloading, we stopped. However, a few times we accidentally DDoS'd their SQL server. I guess they thought nothing of it, until we left them a little message signed by SwaggSec. They realised they were hacked, and simply moved their SQL server.

No changing of admin passwords, or alerting the media. At any moment, we could have and still could destroy their communication infrastructure leaving millions without communication.

China Telecom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SwaggSec said Warner Brothers’ security preparedness was no better, claiming it found confidential IT data about critical internal vulnerabilities after hacking the company’s intranet. Such data could be exploited in the future to hack Warner Bros sites.

The motivation for the attacks is unclear, although SwaggSec did reference “Chinese up in our shit, screwin' with the Pentagon”. ®